Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Fox News Wins SCOTUS Coverage

President Trump's announcement of Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to the Supreme Court drew 6.6 million total viewers for Fox News on Monday night, making it the most-watched network for live coverage of the event.

Fox topped cable news rivals MSNBC and CNN combined, which registered 2.03 million and 1.59 million viewers, respectively, for the prime-time rollout of Trump's nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the high court.

According to The Hill citing preliminary numbers from Nielsen Media Research, ABC News led in the key 25–54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet most, delivering 1.5 million viewers in the category, topping Fox News's 1.35 million and CBS's 783,000 in the category.

Trump on Monday night announced Kavanaugh, a 53-year-old judge on the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, as his pick to replace Kennedy in a nationally televised event from the East Room of the White House.

Nearly 26 million viewers across the major broadcast and cable TV news networks watched Trump nominate Judge Kavanaugh. That doesn’t include more watching on smaller cable networks, including FBN, and streaming news services. But the 26 million total is also -21 percent from the nearly 33 million who watched him nominate Neil Gorsuch to the SCOTUS on Jan. 31, 2017, according to TVNewser.